Wild Aesthetics

12.19.12

Tiger, Tiger Burning ... Mad

The Daily Pic: Bjarne Melgaard makes paintings with bite.

These are two of the “tiger” paintings by the Norwegian Bjarne Melgaard, from his solo show at Luxembourg & Dayan gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. The paintings are immersed in a wild-and-woolygesamtkunstwerk that includes stacks of a surreal, wildly violent, porn-filthy novel by Melgaard, as well as sculptural installations straight out of the mind of a disturbed teen. But I find these paintings more profoundly peculiar than any of Melgaard’s more explicitly (and conventionally) outlandish gestures. I’ve never seen anything quite like Melgaard’s tigers; they have a fearful asymmetry worthy of William Blake.